Killing time during “shelter in place” orders, I figured I might list a few of my favorite magical hoodoo oil recipes – I didn’t get these from any recipe book but simply based the combinations listed below on my own intuition and research, with the self-imposed constraint (mostly observed) of never using any oil or…

In the Thai black arts (so-called “saiyasart”) it would be considered blasphemous to “load” a statue of the Buddha like this, but since it’s fairly common to do so in Santeria, Mexican brujeria, etc, I figured it would work fine for Hoodoo too – once a figure like the Buddha (or Jesus, for that matter)…

Here’s how to do a powerful Hoodoo uncrossing spell – it’s very simple, but also incredibly useful: Get two white candles, and carve off the end of one of them to a point, so that you can literally burn it at both ends. Use a pencil or pen to carve in the name of an…

This piece was inspired by visions I’ve had of the Sacred Heart of Jesus while in the Peruvian Amazon and was dead simple to make. Basically I just got a cheap “sacred heart” statue off of Amazon.com and then drilled a hole in the back; when the bit slipped and poked a hole out of…

Pretty much everything I do seems to work just a little bit better for me when I can put a face on it or anthropomorphize it in some way, and this lodestone was no exception. Basically, this set-up called for a lodestone, a John the Conqueror root, a chunk of pyrite, a piece of red…

When I got scratched into Palo years ago, a friend took me aside in the parking lot of a Denny’s afterwards so that we could speak in private. “The dead wanted me to tell you,” he began: …that you are from the light. I know you’ve been playing with the darkness and with dark spirits…

An all-American legend, Benjamin Franklin is simultaneously the president on the $100 bill who advised folks to be “early to bed and early to rise” AND a member of the secretive “Hellfire Club” who had frequent hallucinations due to untreated syphilis contracted from French prostitutes. I wish I could say I had some fantastic inspiration…

Inspired by the Hindu tradition of the Shiva lingham (or Shiva’s phallus), these fetishes were based on Master Roots and coon dongs tied together in red silk thread and loaded into the bottom of gold-painted ceramic “conversation pieces” I found at a yard sale. For this job, I used a red candle with my name,…

For this fetish, I got a cheap “Day of the Dead” piggy-bank, then glued mercury dimes into the eye-sockets and a crown-shaped candle-holder on top of the head. I set up a purple candle and wrote my name, birthday and “DREAM TRUE” on top of it, then poked nine holes in top and dressed it…

The tradition of maintaining an ancestor altar comes from Puerto Rican espiritismo, but I’ve had one for 20 years and always found it incredibly useful, as an add-on to hoodoo or anything else. A lot of people would even argue that maintaining a connection to your ancestors is foundational to any of these African-influenced practices…